The Haight-Ashbury 30 Years Ago:

A Timeline

The data for this timeline comes from the book The Haight-Ashbury:
A history by Charles Perry. I started it so people could look up what
was going on in the Haight-Ashbury 30 years ago. Well, the 30th anniversary
has come and gone, but the timeline is still useful when you need to find
out what happened when, and it contains many dates not included on the
Judeth Goldsmith timeline, which is the other major timeline about the
counterculture.

1964

June 14, 1964 - Ken Kesey's bus trip to
New York - one Prankster didn't make it and landed in the loony bin.

August 7 - Kesey's Hells Angel party on Labor Day weekend - Cohen's
CD-ROM and biography on Ginsberg dispute date.

September 6 - First newspaper story by Michael Fellon that used the word Hippie to refer to the younger bohemians
(as opposed to the older Beat Generation) in San Francisco. The name did not catch on with the establishment press
until almost two years alter.

September 21 - The Blue Unicorn got busted by the
Health Department. What a bummer!

October 2 - The Beatles concert in the Cow Palace that was so bad
that the Pranksters had to leave halfway through.

The Turning Point

Note: I haven't been able to confirm this, but the idea for the
Summer
of Love seemed to have happened sometime in April. I have been told
that Allen Cohen held a press conference
to promote it on April 5 (see below).

The debate was between the Diggers, who wanted to keep the neighborhood
out of the limelight, and the shop owners, who wanted to turn on the
world. Well, they may have turned on the world, but doing so also finished
off the Haight-Ashbury. I can't help to think of how things would have
been different had there had been no Summer of Love. It was around Easter
when the crowds started showing up in the Haight-Ashbury. Two of the Digger
papers that mention this are Uncle
Tim'$ Children and street
news. I'm not sure why, but Allen Cohen doesn't mention this dispute
on his CD-ROM.

March 26 - Easter Sunday - Be-ins held in Los Angeles and New York.

April 5 - Gray Line Hippie Hop bus tour started - Council
for a Summer of Love press conference held.

April 7 - KMPX starts playing the psychedelic music

April 29 - Los Angeles love-in draws 4000 people

May 13 - Council for a Summer of Love releases announcement - Hippie
panel discussion on NET educational TV

May 15 - Hippie Hop bus tour canceled

May 26 - The Food and Drug Administration reported that it had found
no known psychedelics in banana peels

June 7 - Moby Grape busted for making love with minors two days
after release of their first album

? - The song San Francisco (be sure to wear flowers in your hair)
becomes a major hit

June 10 - Oracle Indian issue published

June 16 - First day of Monterey
Pop - Led to stardom for many of the San Francisco bands, but not the
Grateful Dead, who had equipment problems (Pigpen's organ kept stalling
out on him) and were one of the few bands who weren't filmed for the movie.